Backing Up and Restoring a Fabric in NDFC

Hello. My name is Tomas Klanschnik. I'm a Cisco data center network subject matter expert with the Cisco technical education team. In this video, you will back up and restore a fabric in NexSys dashboard fabric controller. You will begin with enabling automatic fabric backups. Then you will create a manual fabric backup. You will restore a fabric from the backup created before the changes have been made, and you will finish with verifying the restored elements in your fabric. Let's look at an example where you have implemented a VXLAN EVPN fabric called fabric with two spine and two leaf switches in your environment. Your first task is to edit fabric to enable automatic hourly fabric backups. You will then create a manual fabric backup for fabric. When fabric is backed up, you will make a few configuration changes in fabric, such as detaching and deleting a VLAN. Then you will restore fabric back to the point when the manual backup was made. In the end, you will verify the restored elements in fabric, such as a VLAN being configured and attached to the switches again. First, open and log in to Cisco Nexus dashboard fabric controller. Navigate to topology and double click your fabric. You can see two spine and two leaf switches in the fabric. Two networks and one VRF are used in the fabric. To enable automatic backup of a fabric, navigate to LAN and click on fabrics. Choose your fabric, click actions, and choose edit fabric. Go to configuration backup tab. You can choose hourly or scheduled fabric backup. For this example, select hourly fabric backup and click save. Under LAN and fabrics, double click your fabric. Click actions and choose recalculate and deploy. After a few seconds, you can see all switches are in sync. Click close. To manually back up a fabric, in the fabric overview window, click actions, then more, and choose backup fabric. In the create backup fabric dialogue, write down a backup tag. This is used at the restore to easier identify manually created backups. In this example, enter backup demo. Click create backup. After a few seconds, backup has been triggered successfully for your fabric. Now make some changes in your fabric. In this example, you will detach and delete a VLAN in fabric. Click networks tab. Choose VLAN two hundred in this example. Click actions and choose multi detach. Select all the switches where the VLAN two hundred network is attached. In this example, leaf one and leaf two, and click next. Keep the default and recommended option, proceed to full switch deploy. Click save. You see leaf one and leaf two switches with status out of sync and with a number of lines in pending configuration. Click on leaf one pending config lines to review the configuration that is going to be deployed to remove VLAN two hundred. Click close and then deploy all. Wait for a couple of seconds for status to go from started to success on both leaf switches. Click close. Click refresh button in the fabric overview window. Notice the network status of VLAN two hundred is not acknowledged. Select VLAN two hundred network, click actions, and choose delete. A warning window opens. Click confirm to delete VLAN two hundred. VLAN two hundred is not listed in the networks anymore. Now let's restore the fabric from the backup and check the networks after the restore. To restore a fabric, in fabric overview window, click actions, then more, and choose restore fabric. Restore fabric window opens. As you can see, there are five steps to restore a fabric. In the first step, you need to select a backup from which you would like to restore your fabric. You can see several backups that were created in Nexo's dashboard fabric controller for this example. In the backup type column, you can see three types of backups which are color coded. Manually created backups show manual backup type. Manual backups are indicated in green color. The manual backups have tag names in the backup tag column, which you gave when you initiated a manual backup, along with the version in the backup version column. Automatically created backups show automatic backup type. Automatic backups are indicated in blue color. These backups don't have a backup tag and only a version in the backup version column. Third type of a backup listed is golden. To mark a backup as golden backup, choose the backup you want to mark as golden by selecting the backup. Click actions and choose mark as golden. A confirmation dialog box appears. Click confirm. Backup type changes to golden. Golden backups are indicated in orange color. You can mark any automatic or manual backup that you don't want to delete even after you reach the archiving limit as golden. You can't delete golden backups of fabric. If you want to remove the golden mark for backup, choose the backup you want to remove as golden by selecting the backup. Click actions and choose remove as golden. A confirmation dialog box appears. Click confirm. Backup type changes back to automatic or manual depending on how the backup was created. Select the backup you would like to restore, in this example, backup demo, and click next. In the second step, called restore preview, you can see all the devices in your fabric, their status, and potential Delta config. Click restore intent. In the third step, restore status, several sub steps are listed. When they are all completed successfully, click next. In the fourth step, called configuration preview, you can see which switches are out of sync because of a restore and pending config. Click on leaf one pending config lines to see what configuration will be pushed to leaf one switch. All the configuration regarding vlan two hundred that was present when backup demo was created will be restored. Click close and then deploy. Wait for a couple of seconds for status to go from started to success on both leaf switches. Click finish. Press refresh button to refresh your fabric. Under the network step in fabric overview window, you can see that previously deleted VLAN, VLAN two hundred in this example, has been restored. Double click VLAN two hundred network. Click network attachments tab. You can see VLAN two hundred has been redeployed and attached to leaf one and leaf two switches. This concludes the Cisco technical education video on backing up and restoring a fabric in Cisco Nexus dashboard fabric controller. Thank you for watching.